On December 18, 2023, I mentioned in our 2023 year in review that it had been an exciting year for Stacker's Newswire. One year later to the day, and things haven't changed, at least on that front. It was, yet again, an exciting year.
Despite more struggles for the media industry in 2024, Stacker has continued to grow and adapt to publisher needs. Our partner network is approaching 4,000 publishers, and in the past year alone, we drove over 130 million readers to their sites.
A core reason for this growth was leaning further into how we can responsibly source incredible stories from a wide range of third parties. Through our Stacker Connect program, we partner with a range of third party organizations who have established their own in-house newsrooms. Stacker vets and edits stories to our editorial standards, secures full license and redistribution rights, and then distributes the stories to you. The program includes everyone from The Marshall Project to Lyft, whose editor-in-chief was previously executive editor at WIRED and manages a team of six journalists. We continue to operate our own in-house newsroom to augment the wire and ensure it meets your content needs.
Quality remains our north star. Without your trust, the Stacker Newswire cannot be sustained. We maintain strict standards regarding use of artificial intelligence and will continue to be transparent with you should those standards evolve.
Every single contributor to the newswire is vetted (by humans) and every story that is syndicated through the newswire is vetted and edited (by humans).
Beyond quality, the breadth of our coverage expanded significantly this year. Here are just a few of the new content areas we expanded into:
But more stories aren't necessarily better for our network of publishers, which evolved and grew significantly in 2024. What started as a few aggregators and newspaper groups in 2017, is now a diverse network of newspapers, TV groups, radio stations, nonprofit newsrooms, Black-owned publications, parenting magazines, Gen Z platforms, and LGBTQ+ publications.
Each of these publishers has their own own priorities and audience strategies, requiring us to adapt to ensure we are creating a unique experience that fulfills their individual and specific needs. In 2023, I called that personalization would be a major project for 2024, and I'm proud to say that the team delivered. This year we launched:
We will continue to lean into a diverse array of high-quality evergreen content as we always have. In 2025, publishers on Stacker Newswire will see a refreshed Story Hub experience, offering new ways to slice up the newswire.
We'll be experimenting with artificial intelligence by providing optional features to optimize workflows, or by making additional content recommendations. But we will continue to ensure the human touch is applied to every single story that gets published on the newswire.
If you're interested in becoming a publisher parter and to see what the Stacker Newswire is like, feel free to reach out to the distribution team at publishers@stacker.com. We wish you a fantastic winter holiday for those who celebrate, and we wish our media industry a successful 2025.